Natural Amenities Map*
This site has a county-by-county representation of the "natural amenities" in the U.S. Natural amenities are the physical characteristics of a place that make it appealing for living, such as climate, topography, and water features. These features are relatively permanent and are not significantly impacted by human activities or settlement patterns, making them useful for studying regional growth and economic change.
Natural Amenity Rank is a composite of six standardized inputs, which can be selected individually, above. Those variables are: January Average Temp, January Sunlight Hours, July Average Temp, July Humidity, Water Area of the county (log scaled), and the amount of Topographical Variation (i.e, mountains vs. plains on a standard scale). The raw data and paper can be found here.
It's a fascinating map to play with. You can choose the map to represent each of the variables. To me, the topographical variation is the most interesting.
The top of the site reads: "Where do you want to live?" It's an interesting grouping of amenities -- not one that I would rank in the same way.
What is fundamentally good for you*
My Year Abroad by Chang‑rae Lee
"Life, friends, is a people business,” Victor Jr. pronounced with a stained tea towel slung over his cushy shoulder.... Val and I assumed he was parroting some philosophical chef in a video he'd watched, but the dappled glints in his eyes made you wonder if another dimension had opened to him, that he was realizing -- as a lot of grown-ups never do -- that what was fundamentally good for you was staying busy, making something new every day, and having kind social contact." (281)
What it means to become a person*
Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person "What it Means to Become a Person" (1954)
I have pointed out that each individual appears to be asking a double question: “who am i?” and “how may I become myself?” I have stated that in a favorable psychological climate a process of becoming takes place; that here the individual drops one after another of the defensive masks with which he has faced life; that he experiences fully the hidden aspect of himself; that he discovers in these experiences the stranger who has been living behind these masks, the stranger who is himself. I have tried to give my picture of the characteristic attributes of the person who emerges; a person who is more open to all of the elements of his organic experience; a person who is developing a trust in his own organism as an instrument of sensitive living; a person who accepts the locus of evaluation as residing within himself; a person who is learning to live in his life as a participant in a fluid, ongoing process, in which he is continually discovering new aspects of himself in the flow of his experience. These are some of the elements which seem to me to be involved in becoming a person. (123-124)
The process of becoming
Getting behind the mask
In this attempt to discover his own self, the client typically uses the relationship to explore, to examine the various aspects of his own experience, to recognize and face up to the Deep contradictions which he discovers. he learns how much of his behavior, even how much of the feeling he experiences, is not real, is not something which flows from the genuine reactions of his organism, but is a facade, a front, behind which he has been hiding. he discovers how much of his life is Guided by what he thinks he should be, not by what he is. often he discovers that he exists only in response to the demands of others, that he seems to have no self of his own, that he is only trying to think, and feel, and behave in the way that others believe he ought to think, and feel and behave. (110)
The experience of feeling
I would like to say something more about this experiencing of feeling. it is really the discovery of unknown elements of the self. the phenomenon I am trying to describe is something which I think is quite difficult to get across in any meaningful way. and our daily lives there are a thousand and one reasons for not letting ourselves experience our attitudes fully, Reasons from our past and from the present, reasons that reside within the social situation. it seems too dangerous, too potentially damaging, to experience them freely and fully. but in the safety and freedom of the therapeutic relationship, they can be experienced fully, clear to the limit of what they are. (111)
What I have gradually learned from experiences such as this, is that the individual in such a moment, is coming to be what he is. When a person has, throughout therapy, experienced in this fashion all the emotions which organismically arise in him, and has experienced them in this knowing and open manner, then he has experienced himself, in all the richness that exists within himself. He has become what he is… (earlier, as part of an example, for illustration:)
he realizes that this has bubbled through, and that for the moment he is his dependency, in a way which astonishes him.(113)
It seems that gradually, painfully, the individual explores what is behind the masks he presents to the world, and even behind the masks with which he has been deceiving himself. deeply and often vividly he experiences the various elements of himself which have been hidden within. Thus to an increasing degree he becomes himself – not a facade of conformity to others, not a cynical denial of all feeling, or a front of intellectual rationality, but a living, breathing, feeling, fluctuating process – in short, he becomes a person. (114)
The person who emerges
Openness to experience
Now in a safe relationship of the sort I have described, this defensiveness or rigidity, tends to be replaced by an increasing openness to experience. the individual individual becomes more openly aware of his own feelings and attitudes as they exist in him at an organic level, in the way I described. he also becomes more aware of reality as it exists outside of himself, instead of perceiving it in a preconceived categories. he sees that not all trees are green, not all men are Stern fathers, not all women are rejecting, not all failure experiences prove that he is no good, and the like. he's able to take in the evidence of a new situation, as it is, rather than distorting it to fit a pattern which he already holds. as you might expect, this increasing ability to be open to experience makes him far more realistic in dealing with new people, new situations, new problems. it means that his beliefs are not rigid, that he can tolerate ambiguity. he can receive much conflicting evidence without forcing closure on the situation. this openness of awareness to what exists at this moment in oneself and in the situation is I believe an important element in the description of the person who emerges from therapy. (115-116)
Trust in One’s organism
a second characteristic of the person's who emerge from therapy is difficult to describe. it seems that the person increasingly discovers that his own organism is trustworthy, that it is a suitable instrument for discovering the most satisfying behavior in each immediate situation. if this seems strange, let me try to stay it more fully. perhaps it will help to understand my description if you think of the individual as faced with some existential choice: shall I go home to my family during vacation, or strike it out of my own? shall I drink this third cocktail which is being offered? this is is this the person whom I would like to have as my partner in love and in life? thinking of such situations, what seems to be true of the person who emerges from the therapeutic process? he has knowledge of his own feelings and impulses, which are often complex and contradictory. he's freely able to sense the social demands, from their relatively rigid social laws to the desires of friends and family (etc.)….. Out of this complex weighing and balancing he is able to discover that course of action which seems to come closer to satisfying all his needs in the situation, long range as well as immediate needs. (118)
In general then, it appears to be true that when a client is open to his experience, he comes to find his organism more trustworthy. He feels less fear of the emotional reactions which he has. There is a gradual growth of trust in, and even affection for the complex, rich, very assortment of feelings in Tendencies which exist in him at the organic level. consciousness, instead of being the Watchman over a dangerous and unpredictable lot of impulses, of which few can be permitted to see the light of the day, become the comfortable inhabitant of a society of impulses in feelings and thoughts, which are discovered to be very satisfactorily self-governing when not fearfully guarded. (119)
An internal locus of evaluation
The individual increasingly comes to feel that this locus of evaluation lies within himself. Less and less does he look to others for approval or disapproval; for standards to live by; for decisions and choices. He recognizes that it rests within himself to choose; that the only question which matters is, “Am I living in a way that is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?” This I think is perhaps the most important question for the creative individual.
Willingness to be a process
I should like to point out one final characteristic of these individuals as they strive to discover and become themselves. It is that the individual seems to become more content to be a process rather than a product. When he enters the therapeutic relationship, the client is likely to wish to achieve some fixed state: he wants to reach the point where his problems are solved, or where he is effective in his work, or where his marriage is satisfactory. he tends, in the freedom of the therapeutic relationship to drop such fixed goals, and to accept more satisfying realization that he is not a fixed entity, but process of becoming. (123)
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